Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer, speaker, and author. He was previously the Creative Director of Adobe Typekit, and is now the co-founder of lifestyle magazine Lagom, the founder of typography magazine (and soon-to-be book) 8 Faces, and an electronic musician recording as Other Form.

You might expect what follows to be a bitter account of why I should’ve got the gig and how I would’ve created something much better. On the contrary. Not only is this beautiful site quite possibly Airbag’s best work to date, but the final product perfectly answers the initial brief (as well as the various requests along the way, no doubt). The fact that I didn’t win the pitch also ended up being a good thing for me: if I’d won it, I would’ve left my day job (which at the time was at Sanctuary Records) and embarked upon a world of full-time freelancing, which would’ve then made me unable to accept Ryan’s job offer when it came along about a month later. So my unsuccessful pitch actually changed my life for the better.

But it’s not just a twist of fate that makes me glad another agency got this job; I’m genuinely pleased that such a great team got to work their magic with this prpject (and at this point I should also point out that the actual design of the site was handled by Ryan Sims, he of Virb / The Big Noob fame). Last week, Andy Budd and I were discussing the scenario of losing a pitch to a friend and / or respected peer. He said that he was always happy to see good work go to good designers and developers; that it was a nice consolation to lose the gig to someone you really respected and to whom you know would do a good job. So it was ironic that this scenario presented itself to me a week later.

On a small sidenote of further irony / trivia, Greg and I actually discussed the possibility of doing some work together a few months ago. So at one stage, there was even the potential that I could’ve worked on the Sundance site despite losing the pitch myself!

Anyway, the moral of this story is that in this circumstance, everybody was a winner: the successful agency, the satisfied client, and the engaged end user. Well done on the great site, guys!